POLITICSJanuary 27, 2026

Academic freedom and the crisis of the modern university

Karl-Friedrich Israel

Reading time: 9 min

Academic freedom, once the bedrock of universities, is facing internal threats as complacency and bureaucratization undermine independent thought and inquiry.

This is part one of the GIS series on academic freedom. The second installment is available here.

Academic freedom has long been considered the cornerstone of the modern university – a principle meant to protect open inquiry, dissent and the pursuit of truth. But today, many observers sense that this ideal is under threat. While universities still enjoy formal protections and substantial public funding, their ability to foster independent thinking and critical debate appears to be eroding. This crisis is not primarily the result of external interference or censorship. Rather, it is emerging from within, through institutional drift, shifting academic cultures and a growing disconnect between the university’s self-image and its social function.

What makes this moment distinctive is not that universities are politicized. They almost always have been. The difference is that their mission has become unclear, their standards uneven and their value increasingly questioned. To understand how we arrived at this point, we must examine the deeper structural and cultural changes that have reshaped higher education over the past several decades.

How democratization reshaped the university

The modern university did not fall from grace. It devolved slowly and naturally. Its current crisis is not the result of a sudden rupture but of a long, incremental transformation. Historically, universities were elite institutions, designed for a narrow stratum of society. Admission was highly selective, and academic life was shaped by a culture of rigor, hierarchy and, in many cases, deep intellectual seriousness.

But they were also sites of intense political pressure and ideological conformity. The German universities under the Third Reich, as British historian Niall Ferguson has argued, did not resist tyranny. Instead, they enabled it. French philosopher Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs (“The Treason of the Intellectuals”) remains a sobering reminder that universities have often failed to defend the autonomy of thought when it was most needed. Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek also emphasized the crucial role of universities and intellectuals as “second-hand dealers in ideas.” The concepts that shape policy and society are often incubated in academia long before they become politically relevant. Anyone who wants a glimpse of tomorrow must look at today’s universities. This has not changed.

Still, there is something qualitatively different about today’s malaise. Since the mid-20th century, higher education has undergone a profound democratization. What was once an institution for the few has become a mass phenomenon. The postwar boom, student movements of the 1960s and the growing demand for credentialed labor all contributed to a dramatic expansion in university enrollment. This shift brought undeniable gains in access, social mobility and diversity, but it also introduced a series of contradictions that now threaten the integrity of the institution itself.

As universities scaled up, their mission became blurred. The more students they were expected to serve, the more standardized and bureaucratized their operations became. Teaching was no longer a craft rooted in mentorship, but a service activity managed through systems of evaluation, compliance and content delivery. Administrative layers proliferated. Faculty increasingly found themselves caught between research expectations and teaching quotas, with little incentive to innovate in the classroom or uphold rigorous standards.

At the same time, academic specialization intensified. The division of labor within disciplines, driven by funding structures and incentives for professional advancement, fostered hyper-specialization. Knowledge became siloed, and research often grew more inward-looking, losing contact with both student development and public relevance. This shift weakened the sense of shared intellectual purpose that once held academic communities together.

Universities have never been more open in terms of access, yet in many ways they are less open to thought.

Importantly, the democratization of higher education did not lead to a more intellectually open university. Instead, it often coincided with a narrowing of intellectual horizons. The bureaucratic management of academic life tends to prioritize stability and predictability over challenge and dissent. Viewpoint diversity has declined, especially in the humanities and social sciences, where certain orthodoxies are now rarely questioned. While formal protections for academic freedom remain in place, the informal pressures of peer conformity, risk aversion and reputation management have had a chilling effect on genuine debate.

The result is a paradox: Universities have never been more open in terms of access, yet in many ways they are less open to thought. Their democratization has led not to intellectual pluralism but to a technocratic flattening, where administrators manage complexity and faculty retreat into narrow fields of specialization. In this environment, the ideals of academic freedom are more likely to be honored on paper than practiced in reality.

The quiet pact: Complacency, low expectations and eroded value

If the institutional transformation of the university hollowed out its structure, a more subtle shift has hollowed out its function. At the heart of today’s university crisis lies an unspoken agreement – a quiet pact between instructors and students. Faculty are left alone to pursue their narrow research and publish within insular academic circles.

The famous Sokal hoax still captures the worst elements of the problem: intellectual jargon masking meaningless content. Society allows academics to engage in something akin to Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game: an elite, abstract intellectual exercise, disconnected from real-world concerns. In return, they demand little from their students and let them pass. The students, for their part, are not particularly eager to be challenged. They attend the university not for intellectual growth but for a credential. As long as they are not pushed too hard and receive their degree in the end, most are content. This arrangement suits both sides, but it comes at a steep cost for society.

A mutual avoidance of discomfort has transformed universities from places of excellence and serious learning into soft-landing zones.

The university has become transactional. Degrees are increasingly perceived as entitlements rather than achievements, and grades are inflated to meet student-satisfaction metrics or avoid administrative scrutiny. Teaching, once understood as a formative and demanding engagement, is often reduced to the mechanical transmission of content. Instructors who aim to maintain high standards may find themselves isolated or even penalized. The path of least resistance – low expectations, predictable assessments and minimal friction – is simply more convenient for everyone involved.

Meanwhile, many students treat their time at university as a prolonged interlude before real life begins. They are not trained in habits of thought, critical reasoning or intellectual endurance. They are neither confronted with strong ideas nor taught to defend their own. The result is that many leave the university with a degree but without the qualities that higher education was historically meant to cultivate: independence of mind, clarity of argument and a disciplined work ethic.

This culture of complacency has broader consequences. Employers increasingly voice doubts about the value of university degrees. In some sectors, practical training programs or alternative credentials are beginning to outperform traditional higher education in terms of employability. Public trust in universities as institutions of knowledge and character formation is declining. The growing sense that students are being shortchanged, and that society is footing the bill, is feeding skepticism about the entire academic enterprise.

Read more on education

• France’s education crisis
• Universities discouraging the exchange of ideas
• Poor education is no recipe for economic brilliance

At the same time, the disconnect between research and teaching is widening. Faculty in many institutions are evaluated more for their publication output than for the quality of their instruction. But much of this research is produced for specialist journals with limited readership and little real-world impact or relevance. In some fields, entire debates unfold in a self-referential language that excludes both students and the general public. The traditional ideal of the scholar-teacher, someone who produces knowledge and transmits it with care and clarity, is fading.

The result is a university system that consumes vast public and private resources but increasingly fails to deliver on its core mission. It no longer selects, forms or inspires the next generation of leaders and thinkers. Instead, it preserves an appearance of productivity and relevance while drifting toward mediocrity. This is not a failure caused by external enemies or sudden shocks. It is a slow, internal erosion, enabled by a shared willingness between instructors and students to take the easy path. A mutual avoidance of discomfort has transformed universities from places of excellence and serious learning into soft-landing zones.

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